You may think all of the hard work is over now your new web design is ready, but in reality, it’s only just begun. If you want to achieve success with your brand new site, you will need to think carefully about how you are going to promote it.
Here we’ve shared some of our top tips on how to get the most out of your website.
Did you know that the majority of traffic from the Internet comes from search engines like Google? With this in mind, you need to focus on search engine optimisation (SEO for short). The better your website’s SEO is, the higher it will appear in relevant search results and the more traffic it’ll receive.
In order to improve your website’s SEO, you will need to consider both onsite and offsite elements. Onsite, you should be focusing on creating interesting and engaging content featuring relevant keywords. You also need to think about your title tags, image alt tags and the structure of your URLs.
Offsite SEO elements include gaining natural backlinks to your website through creating compelling content that people want to share elsewhere on the web. Social signals can also help to improve your SEO. We’ve discussed the importance of using social media to promote your website in more detail below.
One of the best ways to promote your new website is via social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. Do some research to find out which sites your target audience uses and set up profiles on them, ensuring you provide as much detail about your business as possible.
Once you’ve set up your social media profiles and started following other users, you need to start sharing content. Rather than simply posting links to your website and the products you sell, try and focus on sharing content that has value to your followers, such as how-to articles, industry news and engaging videos.
Creating posts on your own blog is another great way to drive traffic to your new website, however there is also value in sharing other peoples’ content. The more interesting the content is the more social signals it will generate. These include things ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on Facebook and ‘retweets’ on Twitter. Social signals contribute to your SEO (mentioned in the section above) and can therefore help to promote your website in search engines.
As we mentioned briefly above, blogging is a great (and free) way to promote your new website. Not only will it attract people to your website (through finding links to your posts on social media and in searches) but it will also help to establish you as an expert in your niche. This is great for building customers’ trust in your new website and can also help to improve your search rankings.
Make sure you are blogging about topics that are relevant to your industry. Think about the type of queries your readers or customers may have and create content that answers them. The more interesting and helpful your blog posts are, the more you will get out of them.
In addition to creating content for your own website or blog, you may also want to think about guest blogging. This is where your content is shared on another blog, usually with a link back to your website. Getting a link back will contribute to your website’s SEO, whilst also helping to promote it to a new audience.
The key to success with guest blogging is to pick websites that have high authority (use a domain authority checker) and are relevant to your business in some way, whether it’s a shared industry or audience. Don’t pick any old site to post on as this can end up harming your promotional efforts, rather than helping them!
Whilst there are billions of other websites out there to compete with, the good news is that there are plenty of ways for you to promote your business online. Work on your branding, find something that makes you unique and use the promotional methods above to help get the most out of your brand new site.
Don't have time to promote your own website? We can help! Contact the team at Formation today
Image credits: Plymouth Devon and ePublicist